Nowadays, an important economic movement is involved in the improvement of polyethylene trays for the production of seedlings, being developed with different volumes, numbers and cell formats in an each culture-specific manner. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the performance of curly lettuce originated from seedlings from trays with different volumes, through the comparison between conventional and hydroponic-NFT cultivation. Five volumes of trays (10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 cm³ of cell-1) were tested in conventional and hydroponic cultivation, from February to March 2016. For the purpose of comparison, the plants were evaluated through the characteristics of height, circumference, stem diameter, number of leaves, fresh shoot mass and productivity. The use of volumes greater than 10 cm³ showed higher precocity in both cultivation systems, with hydroponic cultivation being more precocious and productive when compared to conventional cultivation.

Lettuce seedlings used on hydroponic cultivation (NFT) are usually produced in trays with small volume, requiring two transplants: from tray to nursery and then to the definitive place. The aim of this study was to verify lettuce performance under NFT system, using seedlings produced in trays with several cell volumes (50, 40, 35, 31, 30, 29, 27, 20 and 10 cm³ cell-1). The tray volumes are considered treatments. The experimental design was completely randomized blocks, with four replicates. Seedlings were transplanted directly to the definitive profile, except those ones produced in 10 cm³ cell-1. Two harvests were performed, at 22 and 29 days after transplant (DAT). We evaluated number of senescent leaves, total number of leaves, shoot fresh mass, root fresh mass, shoot dry mass, stem length and productivity. The best performance was obtained using seedlings produced in trays with higher volume per cell. The nursery phase was not necessary and it was possible to obtain reduction from two to one transplant, corresponding to trays of 20 to 50 cm³ cell-1. Seedlings produced in trays with 40 and 50 cm³ cell-1 made the early harvest possible, at 22 DAT of cultivation under hydroponic NFT system.

Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto (Open Access) sob a licença Creative Commons Attribution, que permite uso, distribuição e reprodução em qualquer meio, sem restrições desde que o trabalho original seja corretamente citado. Avaliação de diferentes volumes de bandejas sobre o desenvolvimento de alface Evaluation of different volumes of trays on the development of lettuce

Mudas produzidas em pequenos volumes de células podem apresentar desenvolvimento menor em relação às produzidas em volumes maiores. O presente trabalho teve como objetivo avaliar o desenvolvimento de mudas de alface crespa cv. Vanda produzidas em nove tipos diferentes de bandejas de plástico de 72, 64,